Art
Punch Drawings and Old Masters Tim Exhibition at Messrs. Agnew's in Bond Street of drawings by Punch artists is only the first stopping-place on a long tour which the drawings will take all over England and the Empire. Everyone will therefore be able to see what a Punch drawing looks like by itself, before it appears in Punch with the joke printed underneath-what, in fact, several hundreds look like seen together.
Agnew's, one of the chief centres of the old-master market, may seem an odd place for such an Exhibition. Colnaghi's would have seemed more faniiliar ground. However, as luck would have it, I found that Colnaghi's gallery was occupied byan exhibition of oil-paintings by old masters. There is no doubt that old masters are often better material for the 'irre- verent joker than the drawings in Punch. By the irreverent " I do not mean, of course, necessarily the Philistine, whom I suspect of thinking that old masters cannot possibly be beautiful and comic and dignified as well. And no doubt he would also refuse to allow that the drawings in Punch could have qualities other than humorous-artistic, for instance. However, as it happened, I enjoyed myself among the old masters. One of them, called Lebrun, responsible for innu- merable dull State pictures at Versailles, ought obviously to have drawn for Punch. In the intervals between drawing weekly cartoons of allegorical ladies laying figurative wreaths on the tombs of personified political tendencies, he could have been very funny, I am sure, for he held a theory charac- teristic of his time, half pseudo-scientific, half fanciful, about the correspondence of human and animal types of physiognomy.
A picture of far greater importance, however, than Lebrun's is the quite small Emperor Charles V on a white horse. It appears to be by Engelbrechts, a very rare artist and one who should have a special interest for art lovers in England, because he was the master of Lucas van Leyden, that curious and original artist whose " works at Hampton Court are some of our chief treasures. Another interesting feature of the picture is the horse, which is closely related to the famous horse in Dfirer's Knight, Death and the Devil' There is something, too-perhaps the design of the plume in his hat-which immediately compels one to adopt him as one of the memorable figures of Northern art, and seems to mark him out as a certain candidate for that popularity which easily attaches to knightly figures, but which as yet, in England at any rate, has not centred on Charles V, for want perhaps of a suitable image by which to focus him. It is to be hoped, therefore, that this small but precious picture will find sonic more permanent home in England than the walls of a Bond Street gallery. , The exhibition by " Six Colonial Artists " at Cooling's Gallery in Bond Street is a good show, but, I think, badly named. The fact that a sculptor like Mr. Gerald Lewers may have his home in Sydney is interesting but not significant. The style lie has chosen is one which is recognized all over Europe, all over the world, as the sanest and most honest for the sculptor of today ; but what has it to do with Sydney more than with London*, Amsterdam, Vienna or New York ? It will look as well in Sydney and be as much appreciated there by anyone with natural taste as anywhere. Indeed, it is the easiest style in sculpture to like, and its universal popularity is a sign of its healthy qualities. Stone or wood carved like this looks its best. Sculptors every- where (at the Royal Academy this year it was very notice- able) are dropping the merely mechanical style of thirty years ago, the making of scale models after life, and are at last dealing with their material as the Greeks and Assyrians did. They have the support of all the most eminent authorities on ancient sculpture for this change of attitude. Sculptors like Mr. Lewers are gaining the respect and affection of an increasingly large section of the public. A statuette in the old familiar style was sometimes a lovely thing ; but it was a thing for collectors to keep under glass, to peer at with an expert eye and handle gingerly.. The new style, which is of course really a much older one than its pre- decessor, has a more robust quality ; a friendly grasp will not hurt either you or it.
W. W. WnmwonTn.
Previous page
